One of the biggest wishes that one has in this world is to be successful. Success can be a good or bad outcome of an undertaking, or either it can be an accomplishment of a purpose. The biggest question arises when many people wish to be successful but don’t know the ingredients needed to achieve success in their livelihoods. It is like a puzzle that one has to play around with the daily routines to achieve that one goal. This great desire for success is what keeps us moving and running, working tirelessly and studying so hard and doing the very best to persevere all the obstacles that may arise along the way. This research will focus on a book Written by Malcolm Gladwel ‘Outliers’ which talks about success life of various celebrated success stories on personnel in our modern history.
As the word Outlier suggests, a scientific phenomenon of things that happen out of the normal experience, to be successful you have to do things out of the normal experience. From the book Outlier in the tenth chapter, ‘The ten thousand hour rule,’ which has outplayed the different life stories of the modern age billionaires and the obstacles they had to go through to reach where they are today. This chapter mainly focuses on the story of UNIX software authors Bill Joy. His success story started when he was still a teenager, he had a strong passion for mathematics and becoming an engineer. During his childhood, computers were a very rare case since it was the early stages of the development of computers. Gaining access to computers could cost a fortune and very rare people could afford, and had to queue to get cards when developing their software. After some period, an advancement was made in the computer technology, and now computer could be shared by more than one person by use of computer terminals. From this technology University of, Michigan was able to develop a prototype of the same networked computer for them to be used by students in practicals. That is the time when Bill Joy developed more interest in computers and gave birth to the rewriting of the UNIX software which has been used thirty years down the line to date.
Practise
For every talent to be natured, there has to be an aspect of practice. Every known footballer, a musician or people who have excelled in all field through their talent, reached to that point by practising tirelessly. From the title, The ten thousand hour rule comes from the aspect of practising. It brought how people exercised in about ten thousand times in a span of about fifteen years. From this study, research was done by a psychologist K Anderson Ericsson where he did a survey of three groups of a violinist to check on their level of practice. The first group were the best students in violin and the second group was a group that was referred to be good but not the best and the third group were students that were not good and only wished to become music teachers in the public school system.
Hard work
Hard work is one of the major ingredients to success in everyone's life. Success does not just come on a silver platter you have to be motivated, focused and hardworking to achieve your goal. From the study above, the best group was found to have been practising for almost ten thousand hours in a span of thirty years. This kind of resilience and motivation acts as a prove of hard work that has maintained them to the cream of all the other students. In another study conducted by the same psychologist focused on a group of pianists who were divided into two groups, the amateurs and the professional pianist. The gathered facts were that the amateurs were found to be practising with no more than four hours for a week while the experts were found to have been exercising at an increasing rate till, by the age of twenty, they were found to have practised total of ten thousand hours like the violinists. The results gathered from their findings indicated that there were no music students who appeared at the top rank effortlessly and also there were no students who worked very hard and lacked recognition in the top most students. The big difference between the students that appeared to be the best and those students never seemed to be good was the level of their hard work. As Ericsson ascertains, people at the top don’t just work harder or even harder than everyone else, they work much harder.
Courage and support
Courage and support are one of the biggest drives for anyone's success. If research is taken of the most successful people in the world, they all had people to motivate them, encourage them, and support them at their young age. In this book, Outliers, Gladwel ascertains that it is tough for a young adult to be successful without the motivation and support from the parents and family or people who care for us in our daily lives. Bill Joy, who is the main case study in this chapter of the book, had very supportive and caring family that ensured h preserved his talent and used for his benefit and the people around him. They did this by answering all kinds of questions as he desired ad bought him s many books as he wanted and ensured that he had the best of education. Most of the people in our modern age have all it takes to become he most influential people in our society but they all lack one of the essential ingredients; that is support and motivation by people who are around them and play a big part in their lives. If Bill Joy never had such motivating and inspiring parents, he would not have reached the door of the university and all the achievements he has made in his life would be none existent.
This scenario is also evident in the story of Bill Gates, which is covered in this chapter of the book. Even though he came from an elite family, he had formed a computer club in school after the computers could be shared. Parents came in handy in funding of the club since they could not receive enough funding from the school. It is through this support from parents that lay a good foundation for bill gates to be one of the greatest programmers and entrepreneurs today.
Talent
Talent is a natural ability to be good at something. For one to be successful in whatever field, it is important to be talented and have a passion for whatever you do. All the people mentioned in the chapter they had passion and talent in their respective fields ad ended up becoming the best at what they do. For example from the [previous examples mentioned in this study, shows that there was an aspect of talent. In the group of the violins, there was a showcase of talent, in the study made about the pianist, there was also a showcase of talent. Talent is the foundation for every successful person and also, to talent, there has to be hard work and a lot of practice. Bill Joy realised that he had a talent for software programming and development when he joined the Michigan University where he ensured that his talent is natured to be where he is today. It can also be seen in the story of Bill Gates since all his teenage time he had always admired to be a programmer when he went head to form a computer club at his school. Through realising his talent he kept on practising and formed a small company known as Microsoft, which has become one of the greatest companies making enormous profits every single year.
TeamworkTeamwork is the act of coming together by two or more people putting together different skills to achieve a common goal. People are born to be good at different fields, therefore for one to be succesful in meeting a certain objective, has to outsource ieas and develop teamwork with other people. All the success stories narrated in this chapter, became realistic through the spirit of teamwork. For example t is stated that Bill Joy never developed UNIX on his own, he had to develop itusing a team of other fellow students. Bill gates aslo never developed micosoft on his own, he had to use other friends. His team work is also shown since the time he was still inschool as he had formed a computer club that would help hime with the new developed devices in computer programing. No one can be succesful without the spirit of teamwork since not every one has all the qualities needed to achieve a certain goal in life.
In conclusion , success is self driven, it does not look at the family backgrounds neither does it look at economic or nfluential situation of a person but it is determined by the ingredients mentioned above and putting them to practise. Not all wealthy people were born wealthy but their determination and hardwork elevated them to their positions and rankings.
